Related Galleries

It started one day in 1963 when he reached the edge of the page. Jerry Gretzinger had been doodling, drawing carefully cross-hatched squares to represent buildings, adding streets and rivers and train stations. And then the page was filled, and he taped another one on and kept going.

“That’s when I realized this thing had a life of its own,” Jerry said in a 2010 video documentary.

For 20 years, a map grew from his imagination, page by page, city by city, farm by farm. He put the project down in 1983. It lay dormant for 20 years until Jerry’s grandson Dylan found it in the attic. Jerry was re-inspired and has been working on the map again since then. For a total of 30 years, Jerry estimates he’s been mapping the region around Ukrania, the largest town on the map, an average of 20 minutes a day. That’s a total of more than a year and three months.

I truly cannot get over the result.

A deck of 114 cards determines what Jerry works on each day. (Jerry Gretzinger)

I’ve tried, but I just keep coming back to look some more. Part of it is fascination. But I think another big part of it is that it feeds my own yearning to make physical maps. I’m always looking for an excuse to draw a map. I’ll never settle for just giving someone a list of directions if there is a paper and pencil nearby.

Ukrania is Jerry’s excuse. I’ve thought a lot about how someone could sustain a project like this for so long. Maybe Jerry will let us know in the comments, but I suspect it has a lot to do with this system he’s devised that takes some of the control of the map out of his hands and lets him be an observer in a way, watching to see what happens to Ukrania. He really doesn’t know which way the map will go, but as he said in a reddit AMA he did last week, “I want to see how it turns out.”

When he gets ready to work on the map, Jerry gets out a special deck of cards and draws one. He then follows the instructions on that card. The cards say things like, “parish facilities,” “scan,” or “new void.”

“Initially, the cards just told me which panel to work on next,” Jerry said on reddit. “Then it occurred to me that I could add instructions which would give direction to my development. One of my favorite cards is the one that says, ‘shuffle the deck.’ Another is, “add a new paint color.'”

“New void” is one of the more interesting instructions I think, and one that I’m guessing helps keep some interesting tension in the map for Jerry. When he draws that card, he covers a part of one of the map panels with a blank, white space. These spaces grow, erasing whatever is in their path. It’s a little terrifying to think about watching your work disappear like this.

Recently, the town of Wybourne was threatened by a void.

“The Void Incursion which most recently hit the Polk neighborhood of Wybourne in Map Years 752 and 805 yesterday (Map Year 1045) consumed another large expanse of that city carrying off to another dimension an estimated 28,590 people,” Jerry wrote on his blog on January 24. “Taken, too, were over 20 commercial blocks and one rail station. Since there is no defense wall in this area it is widely assumed that the entire West end of Wybourne will, one day, be lost to the Void.”

Eventually voids grow large enough that new worlds begin to form inside of them. The only defense against a void, Jerry says in the video, is a retaining wall. Ukrania has a substantial amount of retaining wall protecting it against encroaching voids. Will it survive? He doesn’t know.

A void grows into Wybourne. (Jerry Gretzinger)

“It’s always a mystery to me, and the cards determine what happens. That’s why I keep going,” Jerry said on reddit.

Each panel has been revised, some of them multiple times. For each panel he modifies, he saves the original version by scanning it and then physically archiving the original. He then prints out a copy and gets to work altering it.

Another big way the map has grown and changed is a move away from representational mapping. This started in the 1980s with some limbs cut out of fashion magazines that looked like sand dunes to Jerry.

“But it was really that I wanted just to break out of the pure representational woods and trees and farms and cities, and do something different,” Jerry says in the video.

Since then, he’s incorporated everything from bits of text to faces, to images of gravel or pavement to pretzel boxes to what appear to be working notes about the map. The project now veers between an artistic map to mappy art. The edges of the map are wilder and less restrained. The whole map is beautiful.

I have spent a fair amount of time — I don’t want to say too much time, but definitely more time than I meant to — and collected some images from various parts of the map that I like for this gallery. Take a look at them, and if you are intrigued, clear some time and check out this amazing zoomable version of Jerry’s map. I highly recommend the video documentary as well.

There are currently around 2,900 panels, Jerry tells me, that together cover more 1,500 square feet. That makes this somewhat circular map more than 40 feet across. You can see how small Jerry is kneeling in the middle of it below. But how big is Ukrania?

“The scale is about 1 to 12000,” Jerry told me in an email. “So the Map covers an area of about 120 by 120 miles. Let’s see: that’s 14,400 square miles or about the size of Connecticut combined with Massachusetts.”

One redditor asked what I think is a really interesting question: “Have you ever thought about starting a new location to map out? If so, what would be some possibilities?”

Jerry’s response: “Yes, as a matter of fact, I am toying with the idea of letting new ‘floater panels’ develop beyond the current perimeter of the Map. These panels might be of a different nature, but would eventually join the main Map. In any case, I would consider these floaters to be part of the original Map, even if they were, for a time, separate from the main body.”

If you’d like to see Jerry’s map in person, he has a couple exhibitions coming up. He’ll be at ArtPrize in Grand Rapids, Michigan opening September 18 and at the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center in Vermont starting on November 1. Jerry says he’s open to more shows, so let us know if you’d like to feature his map.

Here’s The Thing With Ad Blockers

We get it: Ads aren’t what you’re here for. But ads help us keep the lights on. So, add us to your ad blocker’s whitelist or pay $1 per week for an ad-free version of WIRED. Either way, you are supporting our journalism. We’d really appreciate it.